Ok this is getting silly. there are only 300 million people in the USA. That includes infants and people who don't even know what Target is. Are you saying 1 in 3 Americans visited Target during this short time period?

Walker:Ok this is getting silly. there are only 300 million people in the USA. That includes infants and people who don't even know what Target is. Are you saying 1 in 3 Americans visited Target during this short time period?

I'm having a hard time believing that as well. It's sounding like the breach encompasses a period of time much longer than that two week window initially reported.

Walker:Ok this is getting silly. there are only 300 million people in the USA. That includes infants and people who don't even know what Target is. Are you saying 1 in 3 Americans visited Target during this short time period?

This is a different set of data "including mailing and email addresses, phone numbers and names" according to TFA. It's likely a superset of the 40 million credit cards already leaked.

Walker:Ok this is getting silly. there are only 300 million people in the USA. That includes infants and people who don't even know what Target is. Are you saying 1 in 3 Americans visited Target during this short time period?

I think there's a lot of double counting going on. They're almost certainly assuming each card counts as a separate person and maybe even each transaction is a different person.

Yes, we have all of your personal information. Everything. But you don't have to worry about this if you aren't doing any thing wrong.

P.S. This is Edward Snowdon. Don't you believe it!

P.P.S. This is the Haxors. We have all of your personal information, too. Edward Snowdon is a bleeding heart liberal. He can bite our shiney metal asses. (Our asses are shiney metal because we can afford to wear pants made of cloth of gold. Booboizee prefers to wear pants made of Platinum, but then she's one of those LOTR nerds and she likes to pretend it is oricalchum or whatever they call that stuff that elves and dwarves wear.)

P.P.P.S. Ha! Hackers! We Illuminati had all of your personal data thousands of years before you were born! Only queers wear cloth of gold. The real conspirators wear invisible cloaks.

yakmans_dad:My wife's card information (obviously) was stolen, but when she asked her credit union about it she said the thieves hadn't used it.

Didn't send her a new card.

/Is that insane?//or what?

I called the bank I use for my Visa because I felt my card had been compromised. They said they'd send me a new card. I called back to find they hadn't cancelled the card. I asked again, and was told that cancelling the card can take up to 60 days and that if there were any fraudulent transactions, I could just contest them.

They no longer have my business.

Yes, in retrospect I could have reported it stolen, but I went on the misguided assumption that when I asked for it to be cancelled and they said it would be cancelled that it would be, in fact, cancelled.

The last time I paid close attention to this issue, it sounded like the POS card swiping devices may have been compromised. Within the brick and mortar stores, which suggested an inside job. But still no clues?

Probably aliens. Not saying it was "space aliens," but I wouldn't rule that out, just yet.

Hell, my credit is so shiatty someone stealing my identity might actually improve it. If you use plastic, you'll get hacked; if you take cash, someone will rob you. I think the lesson here is: never go anywhere and never buy anything.

12349876:Walker: Ok this is getting silly. there are only 300 million people in the USA. That includes infants and people who don't even know what Target is. Are you saying 1 in 3 Americans visited Target during this short time period?

I think there's a lot of double counting going on. They're almost certainly assuming each card counts as a separate person and maybe even each transaction is a different person.

I'm sure that's the case. In the data industry, multiple individuals at an address would count as different records. Plus, if it's transactional data, then each transaction could potentially be viewed as a record, but the stories have read more like duplicate individuals as opposed to a total number of individual transactions compromised.

And meanwhile, I'm still here waiting for the USPS to deliver my replacement card which is about a week overdue. Apparently, travel across the country in the middle of a winter storm is enough to make the USPS lose things for several days.

What pisses me off about Target's deception is that they KNEW this breach happened a while ago, and they sat on that information, choosing to attempt to keep it quiet until after the holiday shopping was done. They were cornered into revealing it when the bulk of the shopping season was over, but even then they downplayed it, lied about the numbers of people affected, and offered a 10% off weekend to try to get people in for those last days of holiday shopping... If they had ANY integrity, they'd have let people know as soon as they'd confirmed it, but they didn't.

So now I'm rubbing two nickels together to pay for gasoline to get to work while I wait for USPS to deliver my new card, and I can only hope Target stores become like ghost towns because of this abuse of customers' trust.

brantgoose:I lost my damn credit card recently and now all of my online accounts are nagging me for a new number.

I think I will get another credit card and use it only for online purchases and pre-payments. That way I will never lose it because it will never leave my secret hidey-hole.

One card for home shopping and another for brick and mortar store purchases. I don't see a downside.

I like your plan, but I also like having all my purchase info consolidated. I need to use my card tonight and tomorrow but then I think I'll order a new one. I use it so much I should probably request a new number once a year anyway.

This is why I have 1,000 credit cards with no more than a $45 limit on each one. Sure people yell and hit me when I am paying for something like, say, a new HDTV at Best Buy, but you can never be too safe.

Just to be picky, I do believe not every number combination is a valid card number. There is a certain algorithm to it. I remember back in the day there where credit card number generators that you could feed to AOL, and they would not check if it was a valid card until a month was up, so a person never had to pay for AOL if you just kept signing back up every month. Or so OTHER people tell me...